Poetry

How To Not Drown In A Poem Full Of Seas

by Sunday T. Saheed

in a village, all a woman carries on her soles are foot-
prints of water — & yet, every man that ratifies her

says she holds them enough, as if her legs are oceans
her sons drowned in. Someone somewhere gazes at

a sarcophagus of quicksand, a sky full of songbirds:
forgive me to say, of what good is a face thrown to

the sky like a net of fish if it falls back onto our faces
like rain-rods; to put a hole into the vanished songs

on our lips? Once, a bird will croon with granulated
sugar, & when it chews too much sweetness, it

dissolves, shape-shifts into an egret pecking on
anything that is a synonym to soil. How does a man

renounce his masculinity, & sink more into a chasm
of weakness: like a pneumonic ca-vity, in a

pneumonic cavity of refracted crimsoning.
a boy with an engraving of his country’s name asks

me to teach him language, how to let every pain he
carries be blinked into a basket of large holes; so:

fa inna maha l usri yusrah becomes a verse of pain
that needs an edit// into a version without the suffer-

ings first: fa inna maha l yusri yusrah — balanced.
I’ve always known what it means to be part of a bead

joined by hard hands; it means your fate is cemented
on a streak of hard things// drowned things. Waking

up with the day as chunks on our eyes isn’t modern,
same way my father tears down his nose to empty his

snuff-box into; as if his tongues are full of trenches
yelling to be refilled. Tomorrow, I’m waking the

night — by lifting sand above my head, lowering my
belly into the kneels of a monsoon sunset, scrubbing

my soiled body with more soil. & like a dream defer-
red, say: Lord, lick me clean of this.

Appeared in Issue Fall '22